Hot air Balloon launch sketch

May 1982 sketch from my notebook of our quick-deploy plan for launching the Greenpeace hot-air balloon to get it into the Nevada Nuclear Test site. Our target was to get it out of the van and into the air in 7 minutes -- before security could shut us down. We ran a second, decoy van out to the site as a distraction.

The ground crew assignments were Steve Rohl, Bruce Hoeft, Sherry Klink, Kay Treakle, Saul Bloom, Jon Hinck, myself, and pilot Gene Stilp.

This notebook ended up soaked in bilge water from some other Greenpeace action later that year, -- either a Boston harbour action or a Trident sub commissioning protest in Groton, Connecticut -- which accounts for the running ink. It smelled like diesel for years.

Blog about the time we crashed the balloon is here.